Summer Camp 2023 (31 Days, 40 Prompts, 300+ Words Each)
ref: Summer Camp homework article
Time for a reset! I am officially repurposing Summer Camp 2023 for my own ends. >:3
With that, I'll still be able to ride the month's tide of community and creativity, but I'll also have seed articles to flesh out between now and World Ember, hopefully avoiding another round of burnout. Wish me luck!
Harokin is the frontier. There is nowhere on that entire huge continent that is safe and secure any longer. No place, no matter how high nor how deep, is out of titan reach. People don't go here, though - travel to and from Harokin is impossible through a constant arcane storm wrecking the oceans in a solid barrier. The rest of the world grieves the loss of Harokin and all the people upon it, unaware that anyone is still alive on the other side (and unable to communicate with them to find out). If kinvari travel on Harokin, it is out of desperation to find a less deadly location where they might survive a little longer.
The only metaphoric frontier on Harokin is the few but gargantuan titan corpses that dot the landscape. Some titans did not have anything in the way of skeletons, be they exo or endo, and when slain by another titan, merely collapsed into a seething pit of tarry viscera that never cooled or calmed, poisoning the land for miles around it. Others, however, left a shell or a skull behind, and when kinvari realized that living titans avoided the graves of dead ones, some feckless few camped in the colossal corpses.
What use could titan flesh or hide or juice be to kinvari? It is impossible to assume no one ever dared find out.
As far as the threshers of TGC are concerned, all of Aerune outside their own territories is a frontier, a wild west where intelligent beings and monstrous creatures live disordered, unpredictable lives fraught with premature deaths and interpersonal conflict and societal collapse. It's a hideous display of heathenry, barbarism at its coarsest. Where they can, threshers in the White Cities extend their structure - their law, their pacts, the very framework of their perfected society - to their non-thresher neighbors. Some few accept and live harmoniously with the Godhurst way of life. Others, like the Ophidians, refuse such assistance with outright violence. The threshers have learned that open conflict with Ophidians is the only time their physical hardiness isn't enough, and now they studiously avoid them as they expand their colonizing efforts across Feraweth and, eventually, Elomawan.
Relics and reverence for the past has everything to do with the civilizations that existed and thrived before the titans came.
TGC has a curious mix of relics - some rather everyday objects preserved from the initial plague that would later create the thresher race, and some extremely alien-looking objects from the island north of Whitemark where the plague was thought to originate.
Summer Camp 2023 homepage | all my submissions so far
Week Two: Frontiers (8) + Wild Card (2)
Week Three: Relics (8) + Wild Card (2)
Week Four: Communication (8) + Wild Card (2)
I got Diamond last year, but burnt out pretty sharply in doing so. The time and energy it took to polish even short articles, find/make art, and write everything to be stranger-friendly--I just don't have that this year. But Summer Camp is still a fun thing for me, and I want to capitalize on the motivation it can provide me.
So I'll be making a seed article for each prompt and writing the minimum 300 words, but without polish--just enough to get me rolling and provide an easy jumping-off point for when I finish each article. I'll still submit the WIP versions (I'm not going to win any awards, I know) because that's part of the motivation, but all I'm actually committing to is 300 rough-hewn words that will start, not finish, each prompt.
Pledge
Like last year, I'm focusing on my two primary worlds, Ysireth (a hard magic fantasy world in its golden age) and Aerune (a D&D homebrew world). Unlike last year, I'm narrowing the focus for my prompts: going to explore the 11k-years-ago near-global catastrophe, the Shattering, that completely nuked Harokin, one of the primary continents on Ysireth. For Aerune, I'll be zooming in on the Godhurst Colonies, home of the threshers. Click for pre-camp homework noodling.
Week One Theme: Power
ref: Power in Worldbuilding: Need, Agency, and ActionWhich are the powerful organizations within your world setting? Who are the powerful individuals? What kinds of power do they wield and what are their weaknesses and needs?
Harokin (Ysireth)
The Godhurst Colonies (Aerune)
On Harokin, the only powers left are the titans. (That's not true; extremely controlling organizations have sprung up in the communities of surviving kinvari. It varies per race and per location. Some take a religious view on the seeming apocalypse; most others are militaristic; all are focused on logistical survival of the greater whole. The power these groups wield is social, and society is the only way most survivors can hope to keep alive.)
The power the titans wield is immeasurable; they are living mountains, consuming arcana to fuel their impossible bodies. They don't use magic - it's hard enough for them to feed on enough mana to just survive at their size - but they really don't need to. They clash in physical battle with any other titan they come across. Some of them appear to deliberately wreck kinvaren settlements and hunt down kinvari fleeing the scene, but most are either indifferent or oblivious to the ants scurrying about their feet.
The weakness everyone has, from kinvari to titans, is sufficient resources. Titans struggle to survive in the "thin air" of Ysireth's typical ambient arcana. Manabound kinvari like elves and dwarves struggle to consume enough mana to live, since the titans are breathing every available iota in to sustain themselves. And in the wake of the physical threat of the titans, kinvari struggle to be able to collect enough food, water, and building materials. The kinvari on Harokin essentially went from a golden age of arcane plenty to a post-apocalyptic fight for sheer survival.
The Godhurst Colonies is, in fact, one such powerful organization. Aerune features few unified political and social powers like TGC; its origin lies to the far west of the known world in the Whitemark Islands. Their namesake colonies, seemingly-independent city-states colloquially called the White Cities by others, are scattered across Feraweth and Elomawan. Each city-state is self-sustaining and self-governed, though politically allied with other White Cities and the Whitemark Islands. Threshers are physically resilient (and magically resistant), making them undesirable enemies for conflict, so most of their neighbors are willing to cede just enough land for each White City to farm and feed itself, then set up trading agreements with the thriving city-state.
Week Two Theme: Frontiers
ref: Frontiers in Worldbuilding: The Edge of the UnknownWhere are the frontiers in your worldsetting? And why would anyone want to go there?! What about metaphorical frontiers, like the “frontier of medicine” or space, the “final frontier”?
Harokin (Ysireth)
The Godhurst Colonies (Aerune)
Week Three Theme: Relics
ref: The Power of Relics: Using History in Your WorldbuildingWhat aspects of the past are revered today in your world setting? Which peoples are remembered? And which are forgotten, and why?
Harokin (Ysireth)
The Godhurst Colonies (Aerune)
Week Four Theme: Communication
ref: Worldbuilding Communication: Tying Your World TogetherHow do people and organizations from different backgrounds or cultures communicate with each other? How does communication happen over short and long distances? Who in your setting communicates secretly or carefully, and how?
Harokin (Ysireth)
The Godhurst Colonies (Aerune)
A huge part of the drama of Harokin is the absolute lack of communication between the people there and the rest of the world. When the Shattering hits, an arcane storm envelops the continent and prevents the usual magical and mundane means of communications from working. Public and personal translocation, the arcane mailing ritual, and perfectly mundane sailing ships are all wrecked. Even within Harokin, magical communication is impossible, and most large-scale communication systems (semaphore towers, etc) have been destroyed, breaking those relay chains. Any and all communication must be done face-to-face, with extremely slow and dangerous travel on foot.
The rest of Ysireth has an extremely dense, redundant network of communication methods that enable most places and most peoples to remain in near-instant contact with each other as needed. Not even counting translocation based on static coordinates or an individual's location, most communities are equipped with a universally-shared ritual for transporting a physical letter from one person/location to another. Many cities also have a physical postal system for deliveries and mail, but arcane methods of telepathic messaging and visual-audio projections are common. Even among less arcane societies, mystical rites can connect the spirits of people to allow them to communicate in sensory impressions regardless of distance. Humans also make use of sailing communication via lights or flags.
The Godhurst Colonies have a particularly unique way of communication, even across considerable distances: threshers have a hivemind impulse called the Whisper. The Whisper appears sourceless and communicates more in emotion and instinct than proper words, but it is not limited by distance and it unifies threshers with a shared lizard brain. Who or what controls/directs the Whisper is not known, even to threshers themselves. Some threshers are more sensitive to the Whisper and wind up becoming local Speakers, almost like relay stations for the Whisper (which is reckoned to originate in the Whitemark Islands and spread to the White Cities across Feraweth and Elomawan. Threshers also use intra-city postal systems that are mundane in nature, of course, and they have a city-state government that issues proclamations and news in a normal fashion.
The rest of Aerune has multiple magical methods of long-distance (or short-distance) communication, but threshers are resistant to arcana and very few of them ever master enough spellwork to be considered a caster. Spells like Message and Sending aren't used within the Colonies and aren't really used from outside them to reach individual threshers.
Summer Camp 2023 homepage | all my submissions so far
Prompt List
Week One: Power (8) + Wild Card (2)Week Two: Frontiers (8) + Wild Card (2)
Week Three: Relics (8) + Wild Card (2)
Week Four: Communication (8) + Wild Card (2)